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medicine 's review for:
Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman
by Ben Hubbard
A really solid read that gets into all of the major points without covering an extensive amount of detail (unfortunately) on each, and accounts for the many actions of the ever ambitious and busy Crown Prince.
It's quite the change to go from studying internal Russian politics, and how A->B->C it is, to the whirlwind of internal Saudi royal politics. It's also amazing that in that system that was built, the complete tyranny held over the money of the wealthy elite of the country obtained via kidnapping and torture, and the (continued) Yemeni humanitarian crisis spawned by MBS personally led to less backlash than the murder of one journalist. I suppose, after all, it only takes one spark to light the flame - and then it's a question of how flammable the foundation is.
It's fascinating how two of the world's leading authoritarians - Putin and MBS - seem to have reached the same spot from the complete opposite approach. MBS represents the eternally fueled ambition of humanity, frail to criticism and bloodthirsty, yet unbroken by the consequences of his actions, and still driving forward.
The question and the unease in KSA is about the new future and what that will look like - a 'modern' society with equal gender rights, the hot spot of hedonism and decadence, where the desert life has been abandoned for comfort, and the only hope is that the oil price remains high.
The opposite is true in Russia since the turn of the century - "Будущего нет." There is no future. The epitome of indifference remains in his seat, untouched and unmolested by the people, simply to hold onto the responsibilities and duties of the Russian people so that these freedoms may not overwhelm them. No grand scale projects of any kind - no pushes to evolve, no sense of liberalism or reform. The only goal is to go back to a past that never existed. "You're a fine one, Mr. Shakespeare. Afraid to advance, ashamed to retreat. So you stop."
Yet despite these completely different approaches, both countries have arrived at totalitarianism, using the same methods. Wage war. Commit atrocities. Mute the voices of the people. Suppress their ability to criticize, and monitor the praise. Sell yourself as something you are not. Use money to blind the morals of those with easily corruptable souls and continue your existence as something that you are artifically producing, and will fail as soon as the country is taken out of or forcefully removed from the completely manual and purposeful control that the leaders personally exert over them.
A young, ambitious, charismatic man who has to navigate a feudal power system in order to crack every bone in his way of trying to fulfill the pipe dream he has for his country. The old, sad, frail man who was selected to become the ghost that navigates a country and its people into a guiltless antithesis of life that rots away at the same rate as its infrastructure - and yet, they use the same toolbelt. And their citizens keep their heads down, scared. Just until the storm is over.
The real scare is when the citizens (Russians) become used to the oppressive rain, forcing their heads down in perpetuity, forcing citizens to morph into zombies on an industrial scale.
It's quite the change to go from studying internal Russian politics, and how A->B->C it is, to the whirlwind of internal Saudi royal politics. It's also amazing that in that system that was built, the complete tyranny held over the money of the wealthy elite of the country obtained via kidnapping and torture, and the (continued) Yemeni humanitarian crisis spawned by MBS personally led to less backlash than the murder of one journalist. I suppose, after all, it only takes one spark to light the flame - and then it's a question of how flammable the foundation is.
It's fascinating how two of the world's leading authoritarians - Putin and MBS - seem to have reached the same spot from the complete opposite approach. MBS represents the eternally fueled ambition of humanity, frail to criticism and bloodthirsty, yet unbroken by the consequences of his actions, and still driving forward.
The question and the unease in KSA is about the new future and what that will look like - a 'modern' society with equal gender rights, the hot spot of hedonism and decadence, where the desert life has been abandoned for comfort, and the only hope is that the oil price remains high.
The opposite is true in Russia since the turn of the century - "Будущего нет." There is no future. The epitome of indifference remains in his seat, untouched and unmolested by the people, simply to hold onto the responsibilities and duties of the Russian people so that these freedoms may not overwhelm them. No grand scale projects of any kind - no pushes to evolve, no sense of liberalism or reform. The only goal is to go back to a past that never existed. "You're a fine one, Mr. Shakespeare. Afraid to advance, ashamed to retreat. So you stop."
Yet despite these completely different approaches, both countries have arrived at totalitarianism, using the same methods. Wage war. Commit atrocities. Mute the voices of the people. Suppress their ability to criticize, and monitor the praise. Sell yourself as something you are not. Use money to blind the morals of those with easily corruptable souls and continue your existence as something that you are artifically producing, and will fail as soon as the country is taken out of or forcefully removed from the completely manual and purposeful control that the leaders personally exert over them.
A young, ambitious, charismatic man who has to navigate a feudal power system in order to crack every bone in his way of trying to fulfill the pipe dream he has for his country. The old, sad, frail man who was selected to become the ghost that navigates a country and its people into a guiltless antithesis of life that rots away at the same rate as its infrastructure - and yet, they use the same toolbelt. And their citizens keep their heads down, scared. Just until the storm is over.
The real scare is when the citizens (Russians) become used to the oppressive rain, forcing their heads down in perpetuity, forcing citizens to morph into zombies on an industrial scale.